


Black Hole Sun

by enygmatic



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 05:47:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15066488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enygmatic/pseuds/enygmatic
Summary: Baphomet contends with some dark truths. This is a brief piece for the DIVINITY fanzine.





	Black Hole Sun

_"You are the sun buried alive."_

He woke up, abruptly, his spine searing with an unknown heat. The sable cool of the Underground did strangely little to soothe that sudden, itchy solar flare embedded in his back. Just a nightmare, he thought. A hotly contested nightmare simmering his subconscious. Sitting up, he noticed immediately that the Morrigan was absent — out for a snack, maybe, he knew they had run low on hummus. She wouldn’t always tell him her plans for the evening, and that always kept him a step behind her. Something itched in his brain, like a fog seeping slow and steady through a thick forest, and then the Morrigan rendered in his mind. She formed as a mere memory, and yet her perfection became total: raw and inspired and untamed. Marian. Hers was a subzero touch to his high noon sun, and whenever the one approached the other, then would something shatter like the thinnest of glass. She was powerful, overwhelming. She was freer than him. All of her, all three of her. She was the whisper of war, the shouting triumph of fate.

Whereas he wouldn’t even speak his own name. 

Nergal. That’s what Ananke had made him. 

“Morri?” Baphomet said, with only the smallest hint of desperate pleading in his voice. He was no longer comfortable being alone. Silence echoed back at him. “Figures.”

His hand fumbled in the dark for his phone. It was true that they managed to get at least 3G, even down here, just as so many people had speculated. How else could those pointedly aesthetic selfies get uploaded? Surely not during the stark of day, or while on a hummus run? Might be a little too hummbling, he thought, too pitaful to suffer. Text app opened, her name already first on his contacts. His forefinger hesitated, hovering just over the inevitable and inquisitive W key, and after a few more moments weighed upon his chest did Baphomet then quickly exited out of the app, aborting that unwritten message. He thought, for just a velvet moment, that he had caught the invigorated scent of pomegranate. He shivered. 

December 30th, 2014. He still hadn’t told the Morrigan. 

Baphomet had tried so hard not to think of Persephone, how alive he felt with her — or perhaps, how understood he felt with her, as if they had always been familiar. An unspoken kinship. They were both orphans, and had become so rapidly. And while he loved Marian, he did so in a layered manner, even as part of him resented their mutually condemned chthonic existence. But he still loved her. A torrid, calamitous, passionate, brutal love — perhaps such was the price of admission, and he’d admit it. He tried so hard not to plague himself with how Persephone smiled, how voice could be saturated with mischief, and yet the deeper he buried that seed, the stronger it would surface and bloom as some terrible decision. Some horrible and isolating decision. 

“Doom is a drink sweeter when sipped together,” Morrigan had once said to him. And Baphomet believed she meant it much too sincerely, beyond any possible Game. He didn’t know what to think after that.

Phone still in hand, Baphomet winced. His mind was a terrible thing to space — he needed a solid distraction before his image golems grew enough form to formally chastise him. Too much time alone to think, that in itself could end so badly. Opening a fresh browser, he immediately withstood the urge to critique the newest trending Baphomeme, instead keeping stern course towards his favorite search engine. In these quiet, solemn hours when he knew he was alone, he had a mission. There was something still burning nearer the back of his mind, something ravenous and insistent. Something plaguing him. 

Nergal. The lion-bodied pestilence. 

Baphomet had known of Nergal, of course, but mostly from the games he played and the media he devoured, or the vague recollections of some Talmudic phrasing. The last Pantheon had lacked one, and quite honestly he had never been much of a Fantheon addict; anything before the 20th century remained eclipsed outside his purview. An image flashed in his mind before the browser page fully loaded for him: a magnificent form, not dissimilar to a sphinx with the head of a man and the elegance of a celestial cat. War and plague and death and the drought-causing sun. Themes and associations that he wasn’t sure he wanted to investigate, that he didn’t think he could live up to, words that captivated stirring impulses beneath his skin like a glowing itch that he couldn’t scratch out. And then his eyes danced to a name — Ereshkigal. The sole ruler of her deathly kingdom, her underground empire, until she had seduced Nergal. Baphomet swallowed hard, unable to stop himself from reading things he was told he should already know. She had tricked him, made him into her king. Nergal had committed some cruel insult, he had wronged her, and then was charged with apologizing to her. He traveled to the Underworld, he met with her and grew infatuated, so she embraced him for six days. Six days, six seeds. Six, and seduction, and becoming bound to the underworld. A cold realization finally chilled his spine.

His reflection was a mirrored to that of Persephone’s. Inverted, perhaps, as his lore spoke of pestilence and hers of spring, but nevertheless they shared parallel. Both captivated, both held captive, with his prison overt and hers an unseen briar patch from within.

“This isn’t us,” he said. Pleaded into the darkness, unheard. “This can’t be us.” 

His relationship with Marian was one thorny with complications, yes, but it couldn’t be like this. Submerged in denial, he thought frantically for any alternative to consider. It was his own guilt, he rationalized, his own regret flooding his perspective and warping the images saw in his mind. He had to fix this. He had to tell the Morrigan about those nights with Persephone, he needed to burn away those sickly mistakes. Trapped beneath miles of dirt, he wanted to again feel clean. He would confess to her, eventually, he ached to do so. But not tonight.

Here would Baphomet lay, buried alive, the shadow-captive sunderground god. 

Burning quietly, darkly. Drowning in dirt.


End file.
